Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Duende is both destroyer and creator. Duende has faces and forms that are both treacherous and tempting. Duende is dark and hard to pin down. It comes from northern Africa and southern Spain. As a word, a thing, an idea, it has only recently migrated to English. Dictionaries give meanings sometimes at odds with each other. Duende is ghost, evil spirit, inspiration, magic, fire. Federico García Lorca wrote: “All that has dark sounds has Duende. Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. The Duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood. The true struggle is with the Duende. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles . . ..” García Lorca’s gives life to Duende in his person and his art, dramatizing archetypal conflicts of dark, human impulses crushed by enforcers of societal norms and conventions. The dictator Francisco Franco tried to suppress, imprison, mutilate and murder Lorca’s Duende, but he failed. It’s in the blood of poets and it’s resurrected again and again in art. Duende resides at this nexus of art and sexuality – an expression of what Salvador Dalí called subterranean biology – “blood-red, viscous and sublime, quivering with a thousand fires of darkness and of subterranean biology.”